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August 24, 2011

If you have been reading my blog, you know that we bought our home last summer. It has been almost a year since we made the purchase. Before buying our home, we lived in a town house we purchased over 5 years ago. The real estate market and the purchasing process had changed a lot in the past 5 years. For one thing, I know that we were not prepared for the amount of paperwork we had to do.

We were lucky that we had a fantastic real estate agent. My father in law has a real estate license but he was not our agent. Due to his poor eye sight, he has been working with a friend named John. We actually used John as our agent and he was really helpful. Before even looking at homes, we got our finances in order and got a loan from the bank. It was really helpful to be able to looking at homes and let the seller’s agent know that we had an approved loan and we could make a purchase.

We knew exactly what we were looking for, so we made a list for our agent. We had a list of must have’s as well as a list of wishes (things we would like to have in a home but they are not deal breakers). One of the must have’s for us was that the house needed to have 4 bedrooms. We wanted our children to have their own rooms and my husband needed to have an office, so we could not settle for anything less.

With our lists in hand, our agent did a lot of research and we spent a few weeks checking out houses in the cities we wanted to live in. We got really lucky with the house we ended up purchasing because it had almost everything we wanted out of a house (including some of the things we wished for but were not truly necessary). The house was on a short sale, and the last buyer could not follow through with the purchase because the family did not have bank loan needed. We were the first people to check out the house when it came back on the market. As soon as we saw it, we knew it was the home for us. It was a home built in the 60’s, but we knew that with some changes (ok, major construction in our case), it would be home we always dream of. The day we saw the home we made an offer. Our offer was accepted the following day. Within a month, escrow closed on our new home. We were told that it was the fastest short sale ever, apparently the quick turnaround time was unheard of. But we had a few things that really helped us. First, we were approved by a bank for a loan to purchase a house and we had documents to show the selling agents. Second, we had a real estate agent who did a lot of research and was great at following up the seller’s agent. Third, we had a loan officer who worked tirelessly to process our paperwork once we decided to buy our new home.

Buying a new home could be very stressful, but if you find the right team to work with you,you will be that much closer to finding your dream home.

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